The “Fellow Travelers” Are Back

Fellow traveler” is a phrase dragged from the rhetorical graveyard of the 1950s, when accusation substituted for evidence and dissent became disloyalty. Its appearance in a new State Department report should alarm anyone who values free speech, political association and the right to challenge government policy.

The State Department’s Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism is not merely a critique of Cuba. A section titled, “Front Groups and Fellow Travelers” revives the language and logic of the Red Scare, while the report places American organizations, elected officials, journalists and activists inside a sweeping narrative of foreign subversion. In this political climate, that is no laughing matter.

The report reads less like serious foreign-policy analysis than a document Secretary of State Marco Rubio has waited his entire political life to publish. For Rubio, Cuba is more than a foreign-policy challenge. It is a family grievance, a Florida political inheritance and, increasingly, a personal crusade conducted with the power of the State Department.

Rubio grew up in Miami’s anti-Castro culture and has recalled boasting that he would lead an exile army against Fidel Castro. Yet his parents left Cuba in 1956, during the Batista dictatorship, more than two years before Castro took power. His grandfather later fled Castro’s Cuba.

Now Rubio presents Cuba as the command center of a worldwide communist conspiracy – one that supposedly infiltrated American government, commandeered Western protest movements and backed an “unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism” on American soil.

Having returned from Cuba less than three months ago, I scarcely recognize the country described in Rubio’s report.

I visited in May with an all-Black delegation organized by the Institute of the Black World and led by Dr. Ron Daniels. What I saw was neither a socialist paradise nor a sinister command center. I saw shortages, uncertainty and exhaustion. A 31-year-old former teacher, who traveled three hours partly by walking and hitchhiking, told us she could not afford children. A ten-year-old said he attended school only two days a week. At Cuba’s Latin American School of Medicine, a physician broke down when I asked about mental health.

But I also saw generosity, dignity and achievement that Rubio’s caricature cannot accommodate. People who had little offered us coffee or water. Cubans spoke candidly about their frustrations. They did not resemble puppets in either Washington’s or Havana’s propaganda.

Cuba’s government bears responsibility for economic mismanagement, political repression and racial inequality. The American blockade also bears responsibility. Both truths fit inside the same sentence. Economics is not theory. People live inside both.

Cuba has engaged in espionage. Ana Belén Montes, who spied for Cuba while working for the Defense Intelligence Agency, is an undeniable example. Cuba has also harbored American fugitives and imprisoned dissenters.

But facts do not become more persuasive when piled beside half-truths and guilt by association.

The report reaches back more than half a century to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s youthful participation in the Venceremos Brigade. Her old activism is recycled as evidence of Cuba’s continuing infiltration of American politics, although she was never charged with espionage, terrorism or any crime. Representative Maxine Waters appears through a 1998 letter urging Fidel Castro not to extradite Assata Shakur. One may disagree with Waters or condemn Shakur’s actions. A nearly 30-year-old letter, however, does not prove that Cuba commands American subversives.

The report also ignores why Cuba has long attracted some Black Americans. That affinity was not implanted by Cuban intelligence. It grew from our experience of American racism and our search for international allies.

Cuba aligned itself with African liberation movements and sent troops to Angola, helping weaken apartheid South Africa’s regional power. It welcomed Black American activists whom their own government persecuted, offered scholarships to students from developing nations and dispatched physicians throughout the Black world. Fidel Castro stayed at Harlem’s Hotel Theresa in 1960 and met Malcolm X while white America treated both men as dangerous.

Cuba’s record on race is hardly spotless. Afro-Cubans have experienced discrimination, inequality and repression. Still, many Black Americans saw a small nation confronting the same United States government that tolerated segregation at home while preaching freedom abroad. Their interest reflected racial solidarity, political judgment and sometimes romanticism – but not necessarily foreign control.

The report targets Chris Smalls, Amy Goodman, Zohran Mamdani, CODEPINK and the Democratic Socialists of America. Some have visited Cuba or opposed the embargo. None of that proves Havana controls their politics. Democratic socialists are not communists. They participate in elections and seek change through democratic institutions.

One can oppose Cuban repression without supporting collective punishment. One can condemn espionage without criminalizing dissent. Influence is not control, solidarity is not subversion, and democratic socialism is not communism.

The State Department has retrieved “fellow traveler” from the rhetorical garbage can of the 1950s. We know what happened the last time our government spoke this language. We should not wait to relearn the lesson.